Lee, Laurie - Sylvia Secker (review date 30 January 1976)

Sylvia Secker (review date 30 January 1976)

SOURCE: "Writer on the Move," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3855, January 30, 1976, p. 102.

[In the following review, Secker offers a mixed appraisal of I Can't Stay Long.]

Laurie Lee describes I Can't Stay Long as "on the whole a scrapbook of first loves and obsessions". He also records that some of the essays were written as long ago as twenty or thirty years. This no doubt accounts for the unevenness of the whole. In the [piece] called "Love", for instance one has a curious sense of déja vu. This is written in what seems in places a modernized version of the style of Rom Landau, who used the same high-flown language, and who was much admired in the 1930s by one's maiden aunts. Here is Mr Lee: "Love approves, allows and liberates, and is not a course of moral correction, nor a penitential brainwash or a psychiatrist's couch, but a warm-blooded acceptance of what one is."...

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